The Big Book I Was Waiting For: Alexander Chee’s ‘Queen of the Night’

Related Books:

1.
Of the many high-drama events that occur throughout Alexander Chee’s second novel Queen of the Night, my favorites are identity theft via cancan shoes, murder by fire-breathing, a hot-air balloon escape, and a scandalous curtsy. Queen is a Big Book in every way: within its 550 pages, a lot happens, and it’s “about” a lot of things. Big Books are back, it seems, though I confess I’ve started and chosen not to finish several over the past few years. On the other hand, once I started reading Queen, I could not put it down.

Paris, 1882. A decade into the Third Republic. Our heroine, the celebrated “Falcon” soprano Lilliet Berne — née a Minnesota farm girl whose real name we never learn — makes her entrance at a ball in Luxembourg Palace. Lilliet is also our narrator, and within the first pages she tells us she has had a “premonition” about this return to Paris after an extensive European tour: “I would be here for a meeting with my destiny.” Enter the writer Frédéric Simonet, who corners Lilliet and conveys a proposition: he has written a novel, the novel will be staged as an opera, and she must play the starring role. Unbeknownst to Simonet, the story he describes — of a circus performer, later a courtesan, who sings for the Emperor and so moves him that he bestows upon her a ruby brooch — is Lilliet’s own. She is duly spooked: how does this man know these details of her secret past? Who has prompted him to approach her with the role? What sort of trap is this?

“In an opera this moment would the signal the story had begun, that the heroine’s past had come for her, intent on a review of her sins decreed by the gods.”

And so launches our heroine’s recounting — infused with this decidedly operatic sense of fateful retribution — of her farm girl-to-diva tale. Interspersed with a flashback narrative, which takes place between 1867 and 1872 and features the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 as its central historical crisis, are present-time (a decade later) scenes in which Lilliet confronts characters from that past; for if someone is in cahoots with Simonet, perhaps with malicious intent, she must find out who, and why.

2.
Writers and readers alike will recognize this narrative structure as both familiar and sound: the past and the present move forward simultaneously, criss-crossing at strategic moments, generating suspense upon suspense. Lilliet herself literally, anxiously, turns the pages of Simonet’s novel as she investigates its ulterior intentions, while the reader becomes absorbed in Lilliet’s tale — her unlikely and at times outlandish journey from orphan to opera star, which she recounts in a voice somehow both taut and melodramatic at once:

“I slunk from the bed and stood again in the cold. As I dressed myself in that dim kitchen light, I felt the opposite of ruined. I felt strong again, ready to cross the ocean again.

“I was sore, that was all. And so this felt like a triumph over death, as if I had been dealt a murderous blow and lived.”

The “murderous blow” — her first sexual experience — occurs shortly after her entire family dies from fever. She is alone and hungry; she takes up with a widower who shelters her. The transaction of sex becomes then inevitable, as does the pattern of Lilliet’s life henceforth — bargaining for survival, over and again. Herein perhaps is a key to Chee’s success in crafting a captivating protagonist: our heroine is a celebrity in the Paris opera world, yes, but she never forgets her hardscrabble Methodist roots. Her love of opera — its outsized gestures, symbols, and emotions — is real, while at the same time she has no delusions about life’s essential requirements. When later in the novel, during the Siege of Paris, Lilliet must survive weeks of hunger, we have no trouble believing that she could in fact do so — no matter what gowns and jewels she now dons.

And we love this sort of protagonist, don’t we? In Lilliet, Chee has done that thing that all historical novelists must do well: draw the modern reader into a past world via the glamor of that past (we enjoy detours into evenings at the opera and Rules of the Game type gatherings, as well as cameos from Ivan Turgenev, George Sand, Cora Pearl, Giuseppe Verdi, and others) but also with contemporary ideas and conflicts. Her twisty-turny journey takes Lilliet from farm girl to orphan to circus performer to courtesan, back to orphan, then to servant, again to courtesan, finally to opera singer (there’s more, but no spoilers here); and as she drifts from the street to the conservatory to the ballroom and back again, we are aware that our heroine has a complicated and heterogeneous identity, with all the attending, familiar dilemmas. Lilliet is ultimately a distinctly modern American heroine: the child of parents who “came to settle America for God,” Lilliet must, and can, continually reinvent herself.

In this vein, the episode with the widower sets another pattern: it is from a dead child’s gravestone near the widower’s farm that our heroine takes her name, Lilliet Berne. In a later scene where Lilliet steals yet another identity — from a girl with whom she shares a jail cell and who dies in her sleep — we see Lilliet switching clothing (parting with the aforementioned cancan shoes) and calculating her opportunity: “[S]he couldn’t use her future, and I could.” At this point one can’t help but think of another historically-conceived protagonist of recent years who hit a contemporary nerve: Don Draper. Like Don, Lilliet is a consummate opportunist and chameleon; unlike Don, of course, she is female in a world where what she desires most — independence, love on her own terms — is impossible.

3.
There is a curious way in which Queen of the Night wears its feminism — by which I mean portrays and expresses the timeless female struggle to be free — so heavily that it ultimately wears it lightly. The book does not read so much as an “argument” for female power or independence, nor as an activist cry in the face of female oppression; rather, Chee expresses himself authorially in such a way that you are just enough aware of him — an enlightened, empathic, culturally heterogeneous male in the 21st century crafting this tale — to simply take for granted, even enjoy, the dramatic ways in which this female protagonist’s struggle for self-determination plays out.

Voice is an obvious central trope here: Lilliet is deemed a “Falcon” because her voice is as fragile as it is strong (the soprano Cornélie Falcon lost her voice at age 23); thus, the female voice as both power and liability. As she navigates her successive identities, Lilliet learns that feigning muteness is a useful disguise. In this way Lilliet, and Chee, reclaim traditional female voicelessness in service of self-preservation.

Jewels and dresses figure prominently throughout the plot: jewelry is gifted and worn in acts of love, dominance, charity, regret, rebellion, and terror, and a woman’s choice of gown has the power to determine not only individual but national fates. None of this strikes the reader as particularly farfetched: While Chee may have been having fun with the characters of Louis-Napoleon and the Empress Eugénie, it seems perfectly plausible, and pleasingly so, that it was indeed a rivalry between Eugénie and Louis-Napoléon’s mistress the Comtesse to Castiglione (which involved both jewels and dresses) that catalyzed the Franco-Prussian War. This is just one example among many where Chee fulfills with gusto yet another crucial, if hackneyed, obligation of the historical novelist — to make history “come alive” through human personality. In this sense Queen joins ranks with the best historical novels and made me think, not infrequently as I read, of one of my all-time favorites — E.L. Doctorow’sRagtime.

Lilliet’s dividedness when it comes to romantic prospects is perhaps the most explicitly feminista thread of her story, the one that seems to want to “say” something to our current culture. One man seeks to possess Lilliet, another she falls for “at first sight” — at first listen, actually, as he is a pianist who plays a mesmerizing Frédéric Chopin. While the choice between them seems conventionally obvious throughout most of the story, there is an unsettling moment when she considers romantic love and abusive obsession not so far apart: perhaps the man who essentially imprisoned and raped her, and the man who manipulated her to manage his own fears, are not so different in the end. In trying to more fully inhabit her role as Carmen, Lilliet concludes:

“She loves neither the toreador nor the killer,it came to me as I went on the stage. More than these men, she loves her freedom.”

In other words: Up with single women; down, once and for all, with the derisive notion of a spinster.

For the most part, though, the strain of feminist messaging does not bog the novel down. This is a particularly subjective assessment, I recognize: it did matter to me as I read that the author is male. This character did not seem like someone Chee had to force into a psychology of freedom-seeking: she is a woman the author seems to know better than any, and one the reader thus recognizes instantly. Her desires, conundrums, strategies, and strength are all, at this moment in time — the reader’s historical moment — wonderfully and completely familiar, and written into this story as The New Normal. It’s exhilarating to follow Lilliet, over the course of 550 high-drama pages, as she simply does what needs to be done — as any woman with talent and intelligence would.

4.Speaking of subjective, this wouldn’t be a piece written by me if I didn’t acknowledge my initial interest in Queen of the Night based on its long-blooming history. Chee’s first novel, the award-winning Edinburgh, was published nearly 15 years ago, in 2001. By lit-world norms, and for someone as visible and active in the literary community as Chee — he teaches, has written for The Rumpus and The Morning News among other publications, won a Whiting Award and an NEA grant, was named one of Out’s 100 Most Influential People, hüber-active on social media, and is an editor of LitHub — 15 years is quite a long time. There was also a first novel preceding Edinburgh — a “Great American Novel” type as he puts it — that he was unable to publish.

Queen of the Night is itself the protagonist of a twisty-turny narrative — much of which Chee describes in his recent interview with our own Claire Cameron. The novel began with inspiration from a real historical figure, Jenny Lind, aka the Swedish Nightingale, and a fruitfully mistaken notion on Chee’s part that she had sung with a circus. When I asked Chee if the novel had always been conceived in the first person, and/or if he had hesitated to take on a female voice, he wrote:

There were seasons of hesitation and apprehension. I put the novel down for three years before I finally sold it because I was both drawn to and afraid of the idea, sure that I knew that woman on the train very well and then later sure that the vision had tricked me into making a terrible mistake that I just couldn’t see.

When he did sell the novel, it was sold based on 115 early pages and a synopsis, with a manuscript due date of 2006. In 2008, the novel still very much in progress, Chee’s editor at Houghton Mifflin was laid off; thus began Queen’s fittingly itinerant quest, including a total of four different editors to date.

Cameron’s interview focuses on Chee’s coping with the low points and dismay of Queen’s odyssey. As a fellow novelist who struggled mightily with novel #2, I felt the following like a punch in the gut:

The longer the novel wasn’t published, the more it seemed to endanger everything in my life — my ability to get teaching work, to successfully apply for grants, my relationship, future projects. Each small delay, each mistake, each wrong turn in the writing became enormous as a result and it was unendurable in the last two years.

But Chee endured; and so, I believe, will the critical acclaim that has and will be showered on Queen of the Night. The novel thus has a personal resonance for me as a testament to persistence, and to the pursuit of a driving, ambitious artistic vision that just won’t cooperate with conventions of time and career progress.

5.
A Big Book asks a lot of the reader, who is also a busy person eager to get on to other books and her own projects. When a Big Book doesn’t satisfy, the reader feels especially betrayed: in the contract between reader and writer, the stakes are higher. Some might feel that the bigger the book, the more forgiving we are as readers: surely among so many pages, there will be bagginess and flaws and plot points that ring false.

The truth is I did put Queen down — for a couple of days at the point where the past and present-time threads converged. This occurs approximately three-fourths of the way through and felt like the moment to take a breath. Lilliet readies herself for the dramatic finale, and so do we. When I picked it back up, I found that the final 130 pages read differently: with so many plot points finding their resolutions, mysteries solved and threads reaching back toward details that both Lilliet and the reader brushed over, I became confused and frequently flipped back and forth to earlier scenes.

I also found myself less engaged by extended descriptions of operatic plots. Faust, Un Ballo in Maschera, Il Trovatore, Lucia di Lamermoor, La Sonnambula, Carmen, Orphée aux enfers, The Magic Flute, among others, all figure significantly into Lilliet’s story. The novel is true to Lilliet’s initial premonition, that her life is an opera and vice versa, so the material is utterly relevant. Still, if you are like me — a listener and a fan, but not a buff — those sections may feel more opaque than others. Chee is at his best, I think, when he is doing opera, via Lilliet’s life, as opposed to describing it.

I am not one to be more forgiving of a Big Book when it comes to the interruption of John Gardner’s notorious vivid continuous dream; but what is notable about these so-called “flaws” is that they are also part and parcel of what makes Queen worth reading. It’s a challenging novel in addition to a page-turning one. You feel, as you read, that you are being swept away by this delicious plot and voice, and that the novel wants to be read slowly — is actually smarter and deeper and more intricately constructed than can be appreciated at its decidedly propulsive pace. Great books satisfy in that particular way, leaving you sated and spent, but at the same time craving to do it all over again. Queen is a book that I look forward to rereading, savoring, studying for my own novelistic purposes. And when I do, it would not surprise me if those flaws were revealed as my own.

Sonya Chung
is author of the novels Long for This World (Scribner 2010) and The Loved Ones (Relegation Books 2016), which was a selection for Kirkus Best Fiction 2016, Indie Next List, Library Journal Best Indie Fiction, TNB Book Club, Buzzfeed Books Recommends, and Writer's Bone Best 30 Books 2016. She is founding editor of Bloom and teaches fiction writing at Skidmore College. Learn more about Sonya here.

In 1996, guerrilla leaders and Guatemalan government officials met in Guatemala City to sign a peace accord. After 36 years, the longest war in Latin American history came to an end. The Guatemalan Civil War officially began in 1960, but essentially in 1954, after the CIA — acting on the business interests of Boston-owned United Fruit Company — orchestrated a coup of the country’s first democratically-elected president, Jacobo Árbenz. For the next three and a half decades, a series of dictators ruled Guatemala with the support of the United States government.

A U.N. report published after the war’s end suggested that more than 200,000 people were killed in Guatemala between 1960 and 1996. Government forces were responsible for 91 percent of these deaths; 83 percent of those killed were indigenous Mayans. Actions taken by the military against the Mayan people during José Efraín Ríos Montt’s 16-month regime, from 1981 to 1983, were retroactively declared a genocide. After the report aired, then-President Bill Clinton delivered a formal apology on behalf of previous administrations, but offered no material reparation.

The story of Guatemala’s Civil War has been told in nonfiction accounts rendered by academics, in the testimony of survivors and activists like Rigoberta Menchú; and in a few novels. The facts of the war’s atrocities aren’t hidden anymore. Neither is the story of the United States’ sustained support of governments that tortured and murdered their own people. Though individual books have been lauded for their formal achievements, brave testimony, or astute analysis, Guatemala’s story, like so many others, never seems to gain enough traction to generate actual consequences for war criminals, Guatemalan and American alike. It’s a story that slips out of the stream of American public conversation, just as soon as it is acknowledged.

Enter Kelly Kerney’s second novel, Hard Red Spring. In a robust 400 or so pages, the novel spans the 20th century, reimagining critical moments in Guatemala’s history from the perspectives of four American women. Whether in Guatemala by association or by choice, each protagonist arrives in the country with hope for a fresh start. Gradually, moments of doubt pierce holes in self-perpetuated innocence. At last the stories these women tell themselves — about their own good intentions or the charitable cause of the United States or their church — give way to the weight of unassailable truths. Each character must confront both her entrapment and her culpability.

Hard Red Spring is an ambitious project. Meticulously researched and written over the course of a decade, it not only retells a century of Guatemala’s history, but dramatizes it — a twinned labor specific to historical fiction. Kerney’s real daring, however, lies in her novel’s emotional aim. She has crafted a story and a set of characters that require her readers to look squarely at what Americans — especially white Americans, the demographic most comfortable in the United States’ myth of moral superiority — will do to maintain our innocence, and what we will do, and have done, in the face of guilt.

Kerney brings us, for instance, into a university in the United States where history is defined as anything that occurred at least 20 years in the past. The distinction exists to keep class material from becoming political. This means a professor lecturing on the history of Guatemala cannot yet discuss the Reagan administration’s funding of José Efraín Ríos Montt’s 16-month regime — the bloodiest epoch in Guatemala’s Civil War.

In a campus bar, a group of undergraduate students react to their professor’s denunciation of United States foreign policy. “If she has a problem with how we do things, she should leave,” offers one student, though the comment is met by embarrassed silence from her peers. “Is self-hatred the only way we can be saved?” another boy asks seriously. “Because that’s all I’ve learned in that class. Self-hatred. If I wrote my final paper on everything I hated about myself I’d get an A.” Caught between scripts of conservative rebuff and liberal apology, the students lack adequate tools to grapple with the meaning of their country’s moral crimes, and what action they might take to counteract them.

Meanwhile U.S. missionaries, NGO workers, and doctors stationed in Guatemala doubt whether they’re helping anyone at all. A doctor from the United States explains his predicament to Lenore, a missionary.
‘It’s the babies,’ he said. ‘I came here to help the babies, but now I don’t think I’m helping’…His expert tone shifted, so that he sounded like an ordinary man. ‘Sometimes it seems if I weren’t here, they wouldn’t be either.’
In such moments, Kerney highlights a dearth of language in the United States to address the web of connection and implication — borne out of an imperial and now neoliberal global marketplace — that distorts any of our well-intentioned actions into a reinforcement of systems of power.

Hard Red Spring gathers momentum as it progresses. The novel’s opening section, set in 1902, lacks a distinct atmospheric feeling of that time period, and occasionally stalls during passages of overwritten dialogue. But as the story moves into more recent decades, its prose grows robust with sharply-imagined detail. The weave of the plot tightens, and building suspense makes for a gripping read. Kerney is at her best in her wry observations of her characters, and in the many masterfully concise one-line quotations offset into the mouths of her secondary characters.

It’s important to note that Kerney has written a novel not only about the Guatemalan Civil War, but specifically about women ensnared in the machinery of that war. She shows us the entrapment of indigenous Mayan women in a system meant to strip them of everything: their dignity, their families, their bodies, and their lives. And she defines the cramped boundaries of power inhabited by more privileged Hispanic and white American women.

The novel’s most sinister characters are its most self-assured men. Even so, Kerney maintains a standard of grim humanity in depicting all of her characters. Men who commit murder have flashes of vulnerability or sensitive insight. Deeply traumatized Mayan women beat an unarmed and — relatively — innocent missionary to death. There is no redemption here, only complication, and a thin cry for empathy for those on either end of horrific acts.

Hard Red Spring completes its story in 1999, over 20 years removed from the present day. Meanwhile, the Guatemalan Mayan community continues to fight against multinational corporations, over land use and the extreme forms of violence and intimidation used to evict Mayan people from their homes. In 2013, domestic protest succeeded in forcing the cancellation of the Monsanto Law, a provision of the 2005 CAFTA-DR agreement that would have monopolized Guatemala’s agricultural processes and threatened food sovereignty.

Neighboring countries also affected by the CAFTA-DR agreement — Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic — face similar aggression from private interest groups — foreign and domestic alike. Earlier this month, renowned Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was shot dead in her home, after her years-long opposition to the construction of hydroelectric dams on indigenous property. Don’t let the novel’s end in the ’90s deceive you — the injustices, moral confusion, and power dynamics on display in Hard Red Spring carry through into today’s world.

Over the course of the novel’s 100-year span, a Mayan folktale emerges as a symbolic link between narrative threads. In it, a deer and a jaguar decide, separately, to build their own houses. Passing like ships in the night, they accidentally help each other to build the same structure, and on its completion decide to live in the house together. As time passes the two animals grow fearful of one another. One night there is a sharp noise. Startled, the jaguar and the deer flee in opposite directions, and never return.

The first time this folktale appears in Kerney’s novel, nine-year-old Evie Crowder is nonplussed. She’s accustomed to stories, like the tortoise and the hare, that resolve neatly into allegories.
‘That’s all?’ Evie had asked.

‘What else? That is everything,’ Ixna told her.Hard Red Spring is not a neat or comforting story either — it’s not built for that. It’s built to explore the truth.

“Obliged to admit that for the first time in my life I feel myself in the middle of a psychological collapse.”Albert Camus was in Montevideo, nearing the end of a lecture tour of South America, when he entered those words into his diary. American Journals, chronicling Camus’ 1946 voyage to North America and his 1949 visit to South America, shows a humane soul with a sharp mind who’s teetering on the brink, one minute penning astute observations on human suffering; the next – perfunctory, and seemingly overwhelmed almost to the point of paralysis by the simplest, most mundane, obstacles.The North American trip in spring of 1946 came four years after publication of The Stranger, and mere months before Camus would complete The Plague. The diary begins on board a ship as Camus struggles with an ocean voyage and girds himself against odd and intrusive fellow passengers. By the end of the crossing, he’s figured them out.”Everyone prides himself on being elegant and knowing how to live. The performing dog aspect. But some of them are opening up.”On such extended voyages as these, false fronts fade after a while and forced impressions begin to wear away. One’s fellow-passengers begin to reveal their true nature, or at the very least one catches on to their facades.Once in New York, Camus observes the many sides of the American character. After noting how funeral homes and private cemeteries operate (“you die and we do the rest”), Camus comments that “one way to know a country is to know how people die there. Here, everything is anticipated.”Of American generosity, Camus has nothing but admiration. While he was giving a lecture, someone had made off with the box office takings which were to have gone to a children’s charity. When the audience finds out, a spectator proposes that everyone give the same amount upon exiting as they gave upon entering. In fact, they gave much more.”Typical of American generosity,”Camus lauds. “Their hospitality, their cordiality are like that too, spontaneous and without affectation. It’s what’s best in them.”Camus travels through New England and on up to Quebec. He also visits Philadelphia and Washington D.C. By the time he’s back on ship for the return voyage, he’s begun to lose interest in his fellow passengers, and his musings reveal his frustration and hopelessness:”Sad to still feel so vulnerable. In 25 years I’ll be 57. 25 years then to create a body of work and to find what I’m looking for. After that: old age and death.”In fact, Albert Camus would die 14 years later in a car crash. But not before yet again braving the Atlantic – this time for a lecture tour of Brazil, Argentina and Chile.Amusingly, Camus provides loose sketches of fellow shipboard passengers. It seems like a mystery or intrigue novel or film noir just waiting to be written – especially as this was 1949. If anything is frustrating about the journals, it is simply that one wishes that Camus would flesh out his often skeletal thoughts.”Woke up with a fever.” I tried to calculate just how many of Camus’ shipboard entries began with “Woke up with a fever” or some variation. But I lost count. I’m now wondering whether a shipboard memoir could even exist without that sentence. Still, despite his physiological reaction to the voyage, or perhaps even because of it, Camus is deeply enamored of the sea in all its raging power – often remaining transfixed by it. It is “a call to life and an invitation to death,” and leaves him with “inexplicably profound sadness.”His exhaustion and his ocean fixation clash on one occasion, when he enters this into his diary: “Too tired to describe the sea today.”Arriving in Rio, Camus notes: “Never have I seen wealth and poverty so insolently intertwined.” Finding himself in the company of a Brazilian poet, Camus offers this scathing assessment:”Enormous, indolent, folds of flesh around his eyes, his mouth hanging open, the poet arrives. Anxieties, a sudden movement, then he spills himself into an easy chair and stays there a little while, panting. He gets up, does a pirouette and falls back down into the easy chair.”The corpulent poet later points out “a character from one of your novels” – a thin, gun-toting government minister. But Camus silently decides that it is the poet himself who is in fact a “character.”In the hills outside of Rio, Camus is taken to a macumba – a trance-inducing spiritual dance where the dancers attempt to arrive at a state of ecstasy. Camus, hanging back and observing with his arms crossed, was told to uncross his arms so as not to impede the descent of the spirits. In the end, Camus yearns for fresh air rather than heat, dust, smoke and writhing bodies: “I like the night and sky better than the gods of men.”After Rio, Camus travels to Recife (A map somewhere in the book would be nice. My edition has none). He describes it as Florence of the tropics. (Although while in Recife, he did “wake up with the grippe and a fever.”)Then it was off to Bahia: “In bed. Fever. Only the mind works on, obstinately. Hideous thought. Unbearable feeling of advancing step by step toward an unknown catastrophe which will destroy everything around me and in me.”For every journal entry soaked in fever and depression, there’s one that lifts you up. Camus writes of a radio program in Sao Paulo where people can go on air to make a public entreaty. An unemployed man went on the air one day and said that since his wife had abandoned him, he was looking for someone to temporarily take care of his child. Five minutes after the program ended, another man came into the station, half-asleep, half-dressed. His wife had heard the plea, woke her husband, and dispatched him to go get the child.After Sao Paulo, it was off to Montevideo, then Buenos Aires, across to Santiago, Chile, then back to Brazil and then home.A slight volume, American Journals nevertheless reveals a fragile man at the height of his fame, who can still, through all of his medical and psychological problems, offer observations which are astute and often amusing, and it offers some personal context to the ideas that would show up in his later works of fiction.

Tillman’s authorial voice is singular, and her spoken voice is, too. It’s truly an amplification of the voice on the page. Many people have remarked on the quality of Tillman’s voice: its strength and intellect, its wit and warmth. It’s also raspy, sensitive, perceptive, keen—delivered with a New York accent.

My appetite for non-fiction is pretty much equal to my appetite for fiction. I read memoirs, essays, and observations as I would read a novel, keyed into the author’s voice. When I read history, though, I read for the information, as though I’m auditing a course at my local community college. I underline the important parts, I try to process the information and place it in context. Sometimes I take notes. I read history when I want to know the facts, and that’s why I love John Keegan. His writing is clear, and he brings unassailable expertise to his books. I first discovered him a while back when I read part two of Ian McEwan’sAtonement in which the evacuation of British forces from France in the face of German invasion is described. McEwan’s vivid description of the grim realities of a small and somewhat forgotten event inspired me to read about World War II in search of more small, somewhat forgotten events. My knowledge of history comes from high school, a few courses in college, the History Channel, and a scattershot array of books I’ve read over the years. I know the big picture, the facts that we are all supposed to know, but, in the case of World War II, I didn’t know the nuances, the details, and campaigns and events that textbooks push to the background in the interest of smoothing out the narrative to assist in the learning process. I found that The First World War neither skimped on the specifics nor did it overwhelm with minutiae. I learned about the Greek campaigns and just how close the Allies were to losing the war. I learned about the British evacuation from France, and, in the end, understood the chronology of events and how all the pieces fit together. As an added bonus, Keegan every once in a while would pause the narrative to describe the realities on the ground, to explain what it was to be a soldier (or a general) fighting in this war. These invaluable nuggets are what make the book great. Naturally, I began adding Keegan books to the queue. The First World War is another great book, and a must read for anyone who wishes to have deeper knowledge of that cataclysmic event. Some fascinating insights: WWI represents a dividing line in history, and much more than the events that preceded it, WWI is responsible for shaping the world order of the last 90 years; this truly was a global war with campaigns in Africa and Asia; though the terrible nature of trench warfare is well-known, Keegan’s descriptions of the realities of the life of a WWI soldier are indispensable. If you are interested in military history, you won’t be disappointed by John Keegan.

And despite all Parks’s entertaining kvetching about the excessive chattiness of fellow passengers and the gratuitous complexities of the ticketing system, Italian Ways is unmistakably an expression of love for his adopted country and its people. The close confinement of the train compartment becomes a metaphor for a society, in all the ways it does and does not work.